Having grown up in Cleveland, Ohio, I quickly learned that gardening in Texas is often challenging. The Senior Director of Gardens at the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Gardens likes to refer to the Dallas-Fort Worth area as the “killing fields.” This area has a hard freeze at least once or twice in the winter, followed by a sometimes wet spring, then a very hot and dry summer. Add to that a black clay soil that doesn’t drain during the wet season then gets rock hard in the summer. There are not a lot of plants that can thrive in these difficult conditions.